Hemlock Grove (36 page)

Just then the baby woke and began to cry as a tremble ran through Roman’s body. You and I both know how hard it is, just as he knew in the heat of his blood what came next. He encircled my legs with his arms and clung closer, shaking now through and through, and brace your heart, he fought. He was a handful of iron shavings flung at a magnet. He felt the pull, but he fought it. This culmination, there was not a stray moment in his life that was not a step on the path to right here. All the time I was bringing him here. He squeezed the hem of my dress and began to whisper to himself. The same words over and over but I could not hear what they were. I waited and his pain flowed through me, but I knew that this was a necessary passage and that he would be overtaken soon enough, as we all are.

Suddenly he stood and stumbled to the window. A tad disheartening, I must profess—I had thought there would be more fight than all that. How I underestimated him! He braced himself with both hands and looking into his own eyes summoned the hardest stuff in him, repeating more loudly now what he had been telling himself: You must make your heart steel. I realized: he was trying use the
extaz
on himself! My prodigy! I glowed with pride even as the precocious failure of this strategy set into his posture and at last he turned to me. He asked why I was doing this.

But he knew. The heart’s compass finds its true north. The blood is the life.

“All I want in the world is what’s best for my baby,” I said.

He looked at me and scraped from the bottom of his resolve.

“You don’t win,” he said.

He reached into his breast pocket and took out a small tin container. He opened the container and took out a small razor blade. He pressed the blade into the vein of one forearm and slashed it from elbow to wrist, and then repeated this with the other arm. He slumped against the wall and looked down at himself as the life pulsed out of him. It did not find its way to the floor but rather climbed the wall around him to form the most excellent incandescent wings.

My baby was flying!

Finally his head fell and I went to him. I pulled him to my lap and closed his eyes and held my fingers to his lifeless neck. I sang to him, the same way I would sing to our sunflowers to make them blossom. And so it happened: life thundered in my fingers and those eyes opened anew and my own precious sunflower blossomed. He looked up at me. All ambivalence and abhorrence now gone from his eyes. He knew. I held out my hand and he rose. Hand in hand we stood before the bassinet. The child now peaceful as he looked up at his father. Blood of blood. I released Roman’s hand and stood back as the flesh of my arms rose. I could hear it in his veins. It was happening. I stood witness to the most delicate miracle of creation. Never in my life had I better earned a cry. So I bawled and he Became, forged as is needful for our kind in the furnace of incommunicable loss, at last at last at last his virgin fangs descending—such fangs! as white and perfect as an angel’s, and he lowered his head into the bassinet to drink.

To think!—how those bleating chattel refer to us in epithet: the tragic absurdity one could be in a more perfect condition and happier with God unalive than undead!

Soon,

O

*   *   *

Still. You must make your heart still.

The Boy Who Made Water of Ribbons

They are still driving. She said they would drive until he said stop and he hasn’t said stop yet. She reaches to reflexively run her fingers through his hair, forgetting that it is now gone, and she massages his rough scalp, knobbed red with razor burn, the flesh pitifully white compared with the rest of him. She asks if he’s hungry and he says maybe a little later. That is the hardest of all to countenance. In her own school days skinny as a willow, she learned it was light that fed the leaves and the grass and in turn everything that fed on leaves and grass and had since she held as firm a belief as any that turning away from the world of food was turning away from the world of light. But even in the remotest provinces of night the dawn will still come and a little later he would be hungry.

They approach a tollbooth. There is a bank of sand and strawlike grass to the left and Lynda’s window admits salty air. A pit bull’s head hangs out of the truck ahead of them, tongue lolling from its death grin like an unspooling red ribbon. Nicolae had said to her while she was pregnant that he had had a vision of holding the baby and the baby peeing on him and the pee coming out as one red silk ribbon after the other, and that was how he knew Peter would have a heightened receptivity in his Swadisthana.

“I knew that life for this little pisser would be long and full of great adventures,” he said. “And it made me hurt inside of my bones with sadness. Because in a life that is long and well lived there are sorrows and darkest doldrums that cannot be understood by those who live day to day like it could be any other. And I knew that the lump inside that great big belly would grow one day into a fine man with fine shoulders and a big heart and he would need both in his adventures, which would take him many times through the Rivers of Woe and Lamentation. But even as these bones were sad for him there was O Beng’s grin on my face because still this boy who had made water of a red ribbon was a Rumancek and this is America, and who knows, who knows!”

Somewhere close by there is a siren. The dog ahead of them lifts its nose into the air and closes its eyes. Peter closes his eyes too. He does not open his mouth, but the message is clear.

Yes, says Peter.

The message is clear.

Yes, I say, and so do you. Yes.

“
A-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
,” says the dog.

“
A-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…”

Acknowledgments

Sean McDonald and Emily Bell, for alchemy.

Lydia Wills, for being a champion.

Lee Shipman and Philipp Meyer, good medicine.

Michael Connolly, walking down that hill.

The memory of Patrick McGreevy, for the Dorothy Parker line (among others).

And for their generosity: Jim Magnuson, Michael Adams, and the gang at the Michener Center for Writers; the Reverend George Hickok and Avalanche; Kate Bolick; Adrian N. Roe and Gilbert Vasile; Smaranda Luna; Carolyn Hughes, Dr. Robert Hudak, Dr. Roy Chengappa, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; the Austin State Hospital; Maja D’Aoust; Ron Baraff and the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area; the Wolf Sanctuary of PA; the Waverly Presbyterian Church; and Lei-Lei.

Also, God.